Virgin Atlantic consolidates voice and data services

Forty suppliers shown the door as airline signs single multimillion-dollar deal

Virgin Atlantic hopes to generate substantial cost savings with SITA deal

Virgin Atlantic has signed a multimillion-dollar deal with airline IT specialist SITA for voice and data services as part of a cost reduction exercise.

The five-year deal will see SITA provide services to more than 100 sites worldwide as well as take over contracts from about 40 suppliers.

The transition should be completed by summer 2010.

Services provided include international and domestic IP virtual private networks, voice-managed local area networks, cabling, core network support as well as vendor and service management.

According to the airline’s director of finance and business services, Tim Livett, the deal is intended to improve service delivery while generating " significant economies of scale" and reducing delivery cost.

The deal is instrumental to Virgin Atlantic’s goal of reducing the overall cost of IT delivery to the business, said the firm’s head of IT services, Matthew Billings.

“We will have the added benefits of simplified supplier management, faster deployment, improved reporting and reduced incident resolution times. All of these are hugely valuable in addition to the monetary savings,” Billings added.

Virgin Atlantic restructured its technology activities in 2009 and aligned them under finance, making its IT director redundant as a result.